The Internet Did Not Sink the Markets a Decade Ago, the Markets Almost Sunk the Internet

10 years ago all of us on the Internet were licking our wounds. We had been taken for a crazy ride in which we went from a point in whatever we touch was champagne to whatever we did was shit.

As an entrepreneur that lived through 1998 to 2002 I emerged reasonably well, I sold my shares in Viatel when it was worth $1.2bn, I sold Ya.com for $700 million but did not sell Jazztel when it was worth $5bn because I was its CEO and saw it go down to $700M (now it`s worth $1.4bn). Then I lost $50M in Einsteinet one of the best cloud computing start ups in Europe that was killed by the post bubble era in which financing completely dried out. So as you read this post you will see no bitterness.

But looking back at 2001/2002 I see this time not as a period in which Internet companies destroyed the financial markets, but as a time in which the financial markets almost destroyed the Internet. It was financiers/analysts who drove those insane valuations up and then down. What should have been a smooth ride on the internet, an era of taking more and more global citizens in its midst, became a crazy ride in which the internet itself gained enormous prestige and was later, for a while, seen as a useless gimmick. Only around 2007 people again realized that the Internet was simply transforming the world economy and was here to stay.

And then came 2008, when the financial industry practically destroyed the world economy. That was when the same financial firms did to the world what they had done to the Internet, inflate it and let it fall like dead weight.

Having been a happy customer of Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and others I don't want people to read this post as a rant against financial firms. We need financial firms. But what we don't need is financial firms to do what they did first to the Internet and then to the overall economy, namely to hype them out of value and sink them hard for no reason. In simple terms what I am advocating has been done before and that is to separate trading from advising. The Chinese Walls in these firms never worked and never will.

 

Follow Martin Varsavsky on Twitter: www.twitter.com/martinvars

Comments

[Mark Kenedy]

04:47 AM on 03/27/2012

Marketing is growing through internet

[Shep11]

08:39 AM on 03/26/2012

"But what we don't need is financial firms to do what they did first to the Internet and then to the overall economy, namely to hype them out of value and sink them hard for no reason." - Sounds like a continuing theme that is played across all spectrums of our society these days. Especially when it comes to the press.

[kamact]

11:17 AM on 03/24/2012

These TBTF banksters are financial terrorists and are the greatest threat to America,...We need to again separate commercial and investment banks,...and indict thousands of their executives,....

[saldog]

12:21 AM on 03/24/2012

Financial firms were not the only ones that caused the 2008 crash. It was every single person who lived beyond their means during the previous decades and piled debt upon debt and then bought houses where they piled debt upon debt. The mantra before the bubble was that "there is no reason to suspect that housing prices will ever stop rising." Please do not absolve all of the actors that played their role.

As a CEO, the author should know that Wall Street can only mislead if the people want to be mislead. From what I remember, there were people buying those overpriced internet company shares and having a great time until the party ended. IThen the mantra was that "in the new internet economy earnings do not matter." SILLY RABBITS -- TRIX WILL MAKE YOU POOR.